Category: Rats

No sign of rats today; just the smashed up black box where they were hiding, and to which I took a hammer, but found nothing there.

Evening; darkness in the yard. No rat-squeaks. No rat-bodies following the wall. Why didn’t they come from pest control as they were supposed to? Why not more piles of poison, spooned from a tub?

No rats, and no Visitor to be disgusted by them. I came home early, lay down; finished a book, thought of reading another one. Then the News, but I felt too dispersed to focus. Who was watching, anyway? And no dinner, prepared from what was gathered from the best shops, all local, all organic, to be eaten together on the leaf of the table that is now folded down.

Evening, and I can play what music I want, and do what I want, on my own. No one upstairs, either; they’re between tenants. No one above me: what peace. But no-one with me: no peace. For it is not as if you can smooth your life flat like the page upon which you might begin to write. Nothing to smooth down or say; was I waiting all those weeks to say something? was there something important to be said? Laughter. Of course not.

A tin of mackerel for dinner. Why not? And then another one. Ricecakes, olive oil, and now an open bottle of wine, I tell myself, to narrow down the night. And nothing to say, nothing in particular, only that gap that opens between the saying and the said (I’ll call it that); between the voice I would want to hear and the words I need to give it. Between the voice that does not need me, and the words I should abandon to it, without caring, without premeditation.

To neglect a page to life: why that formula? To neglect it until it stands up, a quivering arch through which no one passes but through which everything might. An arch – but to where? To this world, this one, and at last.

And the voice? Wind through the arch. The call of this world, this one.

Last night, I refolded the leaf of the table upon which my Visitor, now departed, used to work, and pushed the table back up against the window as it used to be. I’m closer to the yard now, most of which is nearly level with the bottom of the window frame. The yard: there it is, a concrete shore, absolute. The yard that is like the future and the past, or the time before the future and the past and returns into the present. The yard that says: I will be there before and after; I have always been and always will be.

The concrete yard! Across from me, the rotten door from under which the rats came. Rats, who can dislocate their backs so as to squeeze under a gap of two inches. Do the rats still visit? I took a hammer to the planks of wood that were supposed to box the pipes and hide them. I hammered the box apart, there where the rats used to live and found … nothing at all, no rats, no droppings, no remnants of poison. But I think the rats still visit. Didn’t my Visitor see one right up by the kitchen door, very daring? The big one, the biggest of the three rats sniffing the air, little head lifted, there daringly by the door – our door?

The table, this one I write on, is up against the window. The yard spreads to the wall and the rotten door that will have to be replaced, under which the rats slid and probably still slide themselves to do the rounds of the yard, to search it. What are they looking for? The birdfood that had fallen there. The split bag of birdseed I threw away because it was full of just-hatched insects digesting the mix of seeds. And that, split, spilled open, allowing the insects to escape the bag and fly about. Swarms of small flies that put me off sweeping up the spilt birdseed.

I should have cleared it up! I know that now. The split bag in the outhouse round the corner. In the hollow beneath the concrete stairwell that leads up to my neighbour’s back door. Everything must be kept clean because of rats, I know that now. I should have swept away the spilt seed and bleached the floor of the hollow.

What was I doing putting up a bird feeder, anyway? No birds come here. In the past 5 years I’ve seen 2 birds – a female blackbird, who laid eggs in a nest in the outhouse and deserted them when the plumber and I surprised her, and a magpie who would peck open the bin bags when they were exposed because the wheelie bin lid wouldn’t close. Two birds, no more; but I thought I should try and tempt more to the yard. Thought the yard, a concrete shore, could do with more life.

In the end, it is only rats who belong in the yard. Rats precisely because they belong to the end and the return of the end that is the yard. Rats on concrete, rats moving across concrete, like the coming end.

Sometimes, over the summer, clothes and towels hung from the line. The yard was inhabited; it looked as though someone lived here. We’d even eat dinner on the bench, for that month when the sun would reach us there, that month that was mostly lost, anyway, to rain. An inhabited yard; I would come home to find my Visitor reading there, in the hour of sun. And perhaps I’d sit out there too with her, eyes closed against the sun: it was bright! How could that be! The yard, full of bright sun!

But light does not reach here, for the most part. No light in the enclosed space of the yard, whose walls are high. Plants who like shade grow here. Plants in pots, doing well enough, tended by me, watered. Once I pressed a flowering moss into the gaps between bricks on the wall. I’d taken it from somewhere else, from a wall on the other side of the city, to try and grow it here.

It amused my Visitor, who saw at once it wasn’t going to take; that its roots would not bind to the plaster. And they didn’t; I found the flowering moss (small purple flowers) dried up on the concrete. It didn’t take; the roots found no purchase; nothing grew from the old wall with its gaps. And I’d dreamt of the moss spreading over the wall! That moss and purple flowers would cover it like a meadow! That a meadow would spread up across that north-facing wall and redeem it!

For a time, enthused by the presence of my Visitor, I had great hopes for the yard. I took a bottle of fungicide to the low wall that runs right opposite this window, and separates the path, level with the floor of this room, from the raised brow of concrete the same level as the lane that runs behind the rotten door. Off came the algae and the grime, and there was a smooth magnolia beneath, and the red painted brick of the steps. The low wall cleaned along its length was a creamy white, and I thought to clean the concrete, too, to discover its original grey beneath the algae.

A chewing gum grey, pristine: imagine that! I was pleased at the change in the yard I had effected; I wanted more. It is possible to change and shape the world and your own fate thereby, I discovered. Your own fate: because I always thought the yard in terms of fate. Always thought it was my personal Egdon Heath, the unchanging, running 15 foot back and 20 foot across, but fate nonetheless. I always thought: you return to the yard; you sit at its level. Or, the yard returns, and there where you write, at your level, the extended leaf of the table being nearly continuous with concrete. A wooden extension of the sprawl of concrete. And now I thought: it can be changed, scrubbed clean, and perhaps chipped away.

What did it hide, the concrete? Access manholes to the drains – I saw one opened when the men came to unblock the sewer. I saw the secret channel that runs under the yard. And there is still the long scar left from when the water company came to repair a burst pipe. A band of lighter grey upon grey, that scar, leading out to the rotten door, which I must get repaired, and beneath which the rats come, disolcating their bodies to squeeze through its two inches.

Rats on their rounds. Rats surveying the yard, completing a circuit and then, I suppose, out again, but to where? To the lane behind the yard; to other yards, perhaps, or back to the moor, which although divided by roads, still surrounds this neighbourhood. The moor, you can see it on Google Earth, that fits around this village-in-a-city and from which, I think, the rats come, and foxes and even the woodlice who lived in the black wooden box.

We walked out on the moor, my Visitor and I, this summer. Happiness, as I would never want to walk alone. Up the hills, the ‘town tits’ from one of which you can see the sea, a blue line on the horizon, and the individual hills of the Cheviots (it was a bright, crisp day). And all the way to Morrisons at the roundabout, which I would jokingly call Eldorado. We reached Eldorado by way of a thinning finger of moor, that pointed us all the way to its entrance. Perhaps the rats have gone back there, to the moor. Perhaps it is from there they begin their great circuit, and to there they will return. And perhaps the moor will grow up through the concrete again, and through this flat, this house, and the potted plants will rejoin the earth.

Tuesday morning, and the empty bird feeder hanging from the washing line. No birds came, and no clothes hang from the line. It’s cold; the weather is unreliable. Clothes pegs clipped to yellow string, and the potted plants beneath. Didn’t we repot them this summer? Wasn’t that joy itself, smashing the old cracked pots and installing them in new ones? That was a sunny day; we booked two taxis back from B & Q. Two big bags of soil: the drivers didn’t want to bring those. And fungicide. And new string for a washing line and a garden candle that splashed blue wax on the concrete. And slug pellets, that I spread in a blue Maginot line around the potted plants.

Tuesday morning, at the other end of summer, when it’s no longer summer. The end of a season, and the new one not really begun. A few crisp brown leaves on our walk back from town yesterday. A ‘nip in the air’, but not autumn, not yet. At the other end of summer from the beginning of the Visit, and now beached at the Visit’s end, at its farthest edge where, like a beach, it runs up back into the land. The summer was a glade, or a stretch of water. Turn back and you’ll see a gap in the trees, light. That’s where it was, the summer. And now forward again. But isn’t there a larger glade ahead? Scarcely a glade, I think, but a whole horizon of light?

The yard’s undisturbed; no evidence of the rats today. No digging in the plant pots for bulbs, no fresh droppings. And no sight of them plunging into the drain and out, or poking their noses from the split black wooden box built around the pipes in the corner of the yard.

Are they dead? Or are they nesting, the three of them, in some combination working to produce the next generation of rats: imagine it! Another generation, born in the split black box and crawling out! September’s their last month for breeding, and there’s 3 of them. But perhaps they’re dead instead. Dead and rotting in the split black box.

Should I open its cover? Should I hammer open one of the black planks? My Visitor says no. You’ll get bitten, she says. I want to shine a torch into the box, but she says no to that, too. Are they dead? Rotting? We should smell them soon, the three dead rats in the black box. Three rats who crawled in, ate the poison and died.

Meanwhile, the yard, ratless. Plants in their new pots (the old ones split). Scattered earth dug out by the rats, looking for bulbs. Scattered yellow balls of plantfood, too. And the birdseed holder, from which the seed fell that brought the rats. That, and the packet of seed that was full of hatched insects crawling around that I threw into the outhouse. It split, and the insects grew wings and circled about it, and I didn’t want to go near. And then we were away, and that’s when the rats came, 3 of them, crawling about.

The ratless yard, but still the insects that circle its middle as they would do in a room. And fat flies that buzz around the black box – what do they mean? Dead rats, 3 of them, among the pipes? Dead, rotting rats?

Are you writing about rats?, asks my Visitor. Yes, but not humorously. I promised that – not to write about rats humorously. There’s nothing funny about rats, we’ve agreed. They’re disgusting, says my Visitor, and though I don’t find them disgusting, they’re not humorous. You can’t write in a funny way about rats, we’ve agreed. Or write about them at all, says my Visitor, but I disagree.

Rats are constantly chewing, I tell my Visitor; they have to; their incisors never stop growing. If they stopped chewing, their incisors would eat through the walls of their mouth, I tell her. Imagine that! They’re chewing now, I tell her, outside, in their nest next to the drains. Constantly chewing, they’ve got no choice. It’s an instinct, I tell her. What do you think they chewing?, I ask her. The pipes? That wouldn’t be good. The brick? Surely not …

But they’re chewing something, there’s no question of that. They have to. Their incisors are constantly growing, I tell my Visitor. They’ll grow through the roof of the mouth – through lips (if rats have lips). And they’ll grow through the bottom of the mouth, all the way down, through the jaw and out. Disgusting, says my Visitor, I don’t want to know.

Rat droppings on concrete. Black elongated pellets, 10 or 12 of them, say, scattered, some forming a hapharzard pile, the others loose. Rat droppings! It must mean they’re thriving, I tell my Visitor, despite the poison. Perhaps they like it, the poison. Perhaps not enough poison was put down. Either way, they’re eating and digesting; they’re thriving, in a way.

Imagine it! Still alive! Two days after the poison! They live for 1-3 after days eating poison, it said on the tub. Perhaps they’ll die tomorrow. Perhaps not! Imagine! Well, the pest people are coming out on Tuesday, I tell my Visitor. She’s off on Monday, but the pest people will be there the next day. I’m really sorry about the rats, I tell her.

Everything ends in rats, I’ve decided. Everything. They’re creatures that belong to the end, and they bring the end with them. Can they get into the shower?, asks my Visitor. No, they can’t. 9 inches of brick separate us from them. Can they crawl from the gaps into the floorboards into the bathroom? Not that, either – there’s 5 foot of air above the mud under floorboards for the rats to scale. And then the brick that separates them from that under-floorboard space. We’re safe from the rats, inside.

They busy themselves in the drains. Are they dying? Have they eaten the poison? Rats eat in little bits, I learn. A little, and then they wait; and then a little more. Which means poison must seem innocuous, neutral. It’s kept deliberately weak. And acts slowly – over 1-3 days. And how many days is it now? A full one and a half.

Are they dying or thriving, there on the other side of the wall? At night you can hear them squeaking, a kind of strangled birdsong. Once, I opened the door and saw them all, 3 of them, dashing into the space by the pipes they’ve made their nest. 3 of them, as though made of liquid, streaming back. 2 big ones, and a little one, young, streaming. And that’s where they keep themselves, in the box-like construction around the pipes.

They’re disgusting!, says my Visitor. Don’t you think they’re disgusting? But I don’t, particularly. They’re creatures of the end and after the end, I think to myself. They’ve seen what’s going to happen and they’re ready. 

Are the rats dying? We’re watching them from the kitchen window, emerging from the black wooden box constructed over the pipes that they’ve taken for their nest to plunge into the drain where the shower water goes. Three rats, we think, two large ones and one small, all brown, their heads poking out of the box to sniff the air and then they almost slide down, very quickly into the drain. And then up again a moment later, snout first, sniffing …

Are they going into the drain to drink? We think so. But why are they so thirsty? Because they’re dying, we decide. We hope. For wasn’t poison laid down in that black box the other morning. Wasn’t it lain down there, in five spoonfuls, the top plank ripped from the box?

Rats! I was going to start a new category on the topic, like the one on damp. But my Visitor objected: it’s not funny, she said. You can’t make something funny out of it. And it’s true, the rats make us melancholic. Out of the window we look. Rats, sniffing the air. Rats plunging in and out of the drain. As though the world had ended somehow. As if it was already over and this is all there is.