I tell her that I’ve a feeling it might be a rat.
How do you know that? she says. Maybe it’s a pigeon got into the roof space again and then back out? Can you smell anything?
I stand in the kitchen while I speak to her. I sniff and then I listen for a long time, but there is nothing.
*
The next day, Rosa’s at nursery and I’m at my laptop working in the dining room when I hear it again. Scrabbling. A definite scrabbling inside the kitchen. I move into the doorway. Stand stock-still. Listen. The sound is coming from the carcass of a cupboard. I step closer. The sound is definitely inside the cupboard next to the washing machine. Scratch scratch scratch. I’m too afraid to open the door, so I give the cupboard a hard kick and then I hear the creature scramble desperately, claws slipping. Out of the kitchen window, I catch a glimpse of it as it runs across the yard, its thick brown tail disappearing under the back gate.
I call the first pest-control company that comes up online. I am told about the three-stage process for the elimination of rats:
1. The laying of poison.
2. The removal of dead rodents.
3. A full report on how to secure the property against future infestation.
I’ve only seen one, I say. I wouldn’t call it an infestation.
Well, says the woman, rats never eat alone. If you’ve seen one, there’ll be more.
How much is it? I ask.
For the full three-step programme? That will be £400 in total including VAT. No hidden costs.
That’s … more than I was expecting. I’ll have to think about it.
Her: Don’t think about it for too long. Rats need to gnaw. They gnaw through electrics and cause twenty-five per cent of house fires. They carry hepatitis. They multiply. You don’t want to think about it for too long.
*
My mum comes round with a large rat-trap and wire wool that she’s bought at Barnitt’s. We listen to the animal moving in the wall cavity in the kitchen and I stamp on the ground until it bolts again.
This isn’t going to work, I say. What will we even do if we trap it? Where would we release it? They carry hepatitis, Mum.
I try to make Rosa her tea: the rusks are in the kitchen cupboard at ground level and the porridge oats too. My mum plays with Rosa, bouncing her on her lap. She’s telling her the story of the Pied Piper.
Let’s go out for tea, I say.
We eat chips sitting on a bench in town and then Mum says, Why don’t you ring around in the morning? There must be a cheaper way of doing it. I can always ask for an extra shift over the weekend. You might ask your dad for some help?
I won’t ask my dad for some help.
All night long, I’m googling rats on my phone. Infrared videos of them crawling round people’s houses in the dark, climbing up chairs and table legs and into toilets to drink. I wake up longing for the rat’s total obliteration. Nothing left behind – the house destroyed: scorched earth.
I dress Rosa and take her to nursery. I pray that she doesn’t repeat the word rat, which she said over and over before we went out, delightedly, pointing to the kitchen.
When I get back home, I put on winter gloves and I clear the cupboards of food. Then I look through an old copy of Local Link: adverts for roof repairs and cleaners and clairvoyants and there, yes, there it is: pest control.
While I wait for the rat man to arrive, I code documents into XML. It’s my job to make the text clean. I proofread and place tags around parts of articles, around lozenges within sentences, to make sure that they appear correctly when they’re published online.
>title< >author< >date< >main text< / Scratch, scratch, scratch.
When I get thirsty, I go to the Londis on the corner and buy energy drinks rather than go back into the kitchen.
*
Just after Rosa was born, I bought a patch of astroturf to lay out in the backyard. The yard is made of rough, uneven slabs, and each crack is filled with shards of broken slate and small stones. I wanted to give her one patch of something safe and green: I thought of her crawling on it, when she was big enough, or lying out in sunlight. At the first touch of springtime warmth, flea eggs began to hatch in the astroturf. It took me a long time to work this out – I thought the fleas were hatching in the carpet inside. I was suspicious of everyone who visited. I even made my mum strip off at the door, in case she was bringing them back from the care home where she works.
One evening, I looked into Rosa’s cot and discovered a flea fat with blood on her leg. I became demented: I hovered over her all night with a bar of soap, which my mother said the fleas would stick to. I desired Rosa’s cleanness more than anything. I became a scrupulous angel of death. I shook flea powder everywhere. But flea powder is highly toxic: what would I do when Rosa started to crawl? I hoovered the flea powder back up. I mopped and I mopped. Then I bought non-toxic traps instead: a tea light in the middle of a small metal circle covered with sticky paper that caught the fleas fast. But they were still alive then, just stuck. So I crushed their bodies individually between my nails, bursting those little seeds of blood, and scouring my hands after each one.
*
The rat man is small and polite. He pulls gloves on when we enter the kitchen. I walk behind him. He thumps the kickboards until they give way and then he shines a small torch under each of the cupboards. The smell is bad when he does this: warm and close and animal. He finds fur and sweet wrappers that the rat has pulled inside, and, under another cupboard, faeces. That’s its toilet, he says. They’re clean like that. They keep things separate.
We walk around the back of the house. He looks at the kitchen wall, at all of the gaps that have been poorly filled.
Any of these, he says, could do it. A rat only needs fifteen millimetres to get inside. They can eat through that expanding foam. I call it rat ice cream.
Then he looks around the backyard, finds a round hole in the earth next to the back gate. That’s it, he says, that’s an active rat hole. You see how smooth it is? How the earth is clear all around it? Their fur is oily and when they’re in and out, the oil makes the hole smooth and clean like that.
He lays poison. He puts some of it in the hole. Then he lays trays of bright blue poison under each of the cupboards. He rakes the poison with his gloved fingers. Rats, he says, are neophobes. They don’t like new things. We need to leave this ten days or so, to make sure that they’ve gotten used to it and taken the poison.
And can I block the holes in the back wall now, I say, with wire wool? To stop them coming back in?
Best not to, he says. You don’t know where they’re nesting. Could be inside. Could be in your wall cavities. And if you block their escape route, then once they’ve eaten the poison they’ll die inside and the smell is very, very bad and there’s no way to get rid of it.
*
My uncle, whom I haven’t spoken to since Christmas, phones me: I hear you have a rat, he says. It doesn’t matter if you kill it. There are always more. There’s excitement in his voice. What you’ve got to do is work out where they’re coming from and seal off the house.
Then my dad, who hasn’t visited in months, arrives unannounced all the way from Beverley to walk the outside perimeter of the kitchen. He holds his hands behind his back. I told you this house was substandard, he says. You’re living in a Victorian slum. You’re bound to have problems.
We have little to talk about these days, almost nothing we can find a consensus on. He sees any problem I have as the inevitable result of my perverse decisions.
I’ll come and do some cementing for you, he says, once they’ve taken the poison.
I tell the neighbours. Ruth from next door says to me, Don’t feel bad. Don’t feel bad about poisoning it. I’m vegan, and I’d kill a rat if it came in my kitchen.
The old-timer from across the road calls out to me one morning, How are your little visitors?
*
I wait for the smell of death. My sister messages to tell me ab
out the rats her boyfriend had in his old flat. How he laid the poison and then went away for the weekend. When he came back, the flat seemed darker. He turned on the lights and discovered the windows black with flies. The smell, she says, was impossible to get rid of.
She tells me about another friend who used glue traps. For a few days there was nothing. But one morning, there was a single bloodied claw stuck to the bottom of a trap. The rat had gnawed its way to freedom.
I tell her to stop messaging me about rats.
I buy scented candles and incense and spread them all over the house until the air tastes like soap.
*
Before I bought this house, I lived in a top-floor flat in a converted fruit warehouse on the other side of the city with Lucy, my ex. A few months after we moved in, we were burgled by someone who had a key. They had burgled us with a kind of frenzy, rifling through every drawer and cupboard, but also ripping open everything they could find: shirts were thrown onto the floor with the buttons ripped off, sealed packets of spaghetti and washing-up tablets had been torn open and spilled out, as though we might have had our valuables laminated inside them. The woman in the flat next door looked pleased when I said we’d had a break-in. She told us that at least ten people had been sleeping in the flat before we moved in. Chinese, she whispered in a significant tone. You’d best call the landlord and get a locksmith in, she said.
You get some jobs you have a bad feeling about, the locksmith said on his knees in the shared hallway, disarticulating the bottom lock. Like, how do I know you’re not the burglars? I mean, obviously you’re not.
He looked me and Lucy over, and we both felt inadequate.
But with other … clients, you arrive, and they’ve no proof the place is theirs. Divorces, other shady stuff. You wonder if you’re being paid to lock someone out of their own home sometimes. So I’m thinking of retraining. To do something … decent. Something clean. You know.
Yes, I thought, when he said that. Yes, I know what you mean. My great-grandfather was a night-soil man, collecting shit from outside water-closets as the dawn broke over Bradford each morning. My mother looks after the elderly, sponging and toileting the bodies of frail strangers. My father was a public health inspector, dealing in abattoirs, drains, infestations, pestilent kitchens. All I’ve ever wanted was clean work.
He carried on working and I brought him coffee and then he said to me: What do you do for work?
I was working a few different jobs back then, part-time, so I picked one. I work in a library, I said. I shelve books at the university library in town.
Have they got valuable books? he asked. Some, I said, in special collections.
How do you protect them?
We have reading rooms, I said. And you have to apply for access. Some of the rarer things, you can only see if you’re supervised by an archivist.
Nah, he said, I mean from vermin. I’m thinking of getting into pest control. Been doing my research. Rodents, they’re a problem in libraries. And moths, too. It’s a tricky business, though. You’ve got to be careful. Even then you can get into trouble. You can’t even look at a badger funny. If you catch a bird in a net, you’re looking at thirteen months in jail.
*
When the rat man comes back, he asks me if I have any holidays planned. I haven’t.
I’m off to Portugal next week, he says. He’s cheerful as he checks the poison under the cupboards.
Doesn’t it bother you, I say, going under there?
These don’t bother me, he says, it’s the small ones that bother me. Cockroaches and bedbugs. Wasps. Coming into wasp season now, he says. It’ll be fumigations all afternoon. The rat has taken the poison. The rat has eaten all of the poison in one of the trays, so now it will be dead or dying, he says. And as there’s no smell, he’s confident it’s gone back outside. He’ll come back in a few days’ time.
I’ve to ring him if I hear or smell anything different.
*
Autumn’s here: webs collecting in all the corners of the house, great fragile harvestmen descending from the light fittings. I’ve stopped trying to get rid of them.
When the rat man comes for the final time, he removes the trays of poison and tells me to seal up all the holes in the yard and the walls with wire wool and cement.
I listen for noises while I’m working, and sometimes I hear a ticking sound near the sink. When I go into the kitchen, I stamp my feet and bang about. I’ve filled up the gaps as best I can; every hole is stuffed with wire wool, which coated my fingertips and adhered to my cheeks and lips and made them bleed.
I buy peppermint plants and strong-smelling oils to keep in the kitchen: a warding off. I search and search for tiny traces of blue poison, trailing my fingertips along the floorboards for any tiny toxic thing that Rosa might find and eat.
At night-time, sometimes, I still look for rats. In the dark, as Rosa whimpers, I search on my phone and click all the way to a Rat King. A rat king is a ball of rats caught-up together, tails matted fast with filth. A rat king is a wheel of animals, trapped together in their nest. Fastened to one another, terminally: the young to the old, the living to their dead.
*
Every day, I clean up the articles that are sent to me, and Rosa grows bigger. The mould in the kitchen is spreading again, and a bright yellow fungus has begun to grow where the paint is peeling off the window frames. The wood there is sodden and comes away when I press it with my thumbnail. I can’t afford to do anything about it until next summer. The floorboards are damp now too, swelling and spongy underfoot. I catch Rosa working away at one of them, peeling away a fat splinter with her keen fingernails and pushing it into her mouth before I can stop her.
At nursery pickup time, I watch other people with their children: they’re bright-faced in the cold in new woollen clothes. I love winter! one woman says to me. And being all cosy at home with them! Don’t you?
The late afternoon is cold blue hush: that deathly hour just before winter nightfall. I walk slowly with the pushchair. The evening rolls out ahead of me: teatime and bath-time, scooping the spaghetti hoops from the floor, wiping Rosa’s face, taking off her soiled clothes, folding her fat, damp nappy into the bin. The tender, tedious rituals of making her clean again: the lick of thick cream on her bottom, the fresh nappy, the almond lotion on her belly and legs. I’ll nurse her to sleep – that pain when she first latches still like a lance, but it softens as she drifts, until I can barely feel she’s there. I’ll press my nose to the skin of her scalp then. Baby soap and something else: something new, something sweet and fungal that I breathe in deep.
*
It’s the new year when I hear it again. The scrambling sound, the weird, scratchy, garbled movement somewhere in the dark, internal workings of the kitchen. I stand in the doorway. The sound is coming from the carcass of a cupboard. I step closer. The sound is definitely inside the cupboard next to the washing machine. The same place as before. This time, I want to see it. To face it. I reach out. Hand on cupboard door. Slowly, slowly open it. Frozen. Both of us frozen for one long moment. Then: tiny tics of attention. Sleek brown fur rippling with movement. Sharp eyes. A large, well-fed, supple body. The creature collides with the cheese grater and then drops away down the back of the cupboard.
I’m breathless afterwards. A slight tremor in my hand. I think about calling the rat man. But I don’t; not now. Not yet. She looked so clean and fat and bright, our rat.
Fifteen pellets is all it takes.
Lying in bed that night, I try not to listen. I try to pretend there’s nothing to hear. Just the little murmurs that Rosa makes in her sleep; the echo of a pigeon in the chimney breast; the house ticking as it contracts inside the cold surround of the night. But there, there it is: a scuttle in the wall. The garbled scrabble of claws somewhere inside the house.
I lie awake until it moves away and then I fall into a dream. Inside of the dream, Rosa is nursing all night long, her mouth smooshed to my breast. Inside of th
e dream, my milk runs blue in my veins. My milk runs in blue rivulets through my body. My milk runs through the veins of my breasts towards her: luminous, blue and deadly poisonous.
TRANSPLANT
JENNA ISHERWOOD
Ismuggle a seed through airport security, passport control and customs. I stand in fluorescent-lit lines, bend myself to bureaucracies. I walk past the signs about fish, cheese, meat, agricultural products and honey. I don’t look dangerous, I suppose. My passport is well-stamped; I look at home in airports (activewear, bottled water), transplant that I am. The seed is from my grand-mother’s balcony garden, which clings to the side of my parents’ flat. The plant is spiky and resilient. It will be able to make a home here, I am sure. Anyway, it’s in.
I let the faces on campus wash past me. None are familiar, many are indistinguishable. People look at me like I’m a replica of someone else, or an idea they no longer find interesting. I meet with my supervisor and I’m uncertain when I should talk.
‘Sorry, it’s been a crazy week.’ My supervisor has pens in her hair. The buttons on her cardigan don’t line up. ‘I’m buying a house. Most stressful life experience after death of a parent, apparently.’
I am not sure if this is supposed to be funny. She tells me to make sure I go to the induction talks about safety and well-being.
I show my visa to a Landlord and move into a house with a Physicist and a Historian. When he shows me the place, the Landlord says he likes students like me. ‘Very clean,’ he says. ‘Are you well-behaved? You look nice and quiet.’ I feel inspected. ‘The perfect woman!’ He laughs while looking over at the Physicist, who also laughs but without smiling.
After the Landlord has left, the Historian says I shouldn’t let myself be on my own with him. I nod and hope she can see that I have understood her. She fluffs her wavy hair. The Physicist polishes his glasses.
I plant the seed in a yoghurt pot on the kitchen window-sill. My grandmother said the plant likes south-facing light, so here it must stay in the communal kitchen.
The Physicist, the Historian and I overlap sometimes, but not that often. It seems odd to me. Three people occupying a home, living separate lives. There is more space here than we had at our flat. I think about my mother and father returning in the evening, dark circles under their eyes, and my grandmother bringing us steaming bowls that we’d slurp together, squeezed around a table in the hour that was left before we all slept.
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