Halfway through last week, Bernice and I started suspecting we had a poltergeist, or possibly a gremlin, in the house. A couple of times we heard a bump or crash that seemed not to come from next door. The third time this happened, we discovered that a couple of memorial candles had fallen from a shelf in the utility room.
When this happened again, and we investigated further, we discovered some droppings on the floor, and we realised we had vermin. The big questions were, naturally: How many? and What kind? To which our heartfelt responses were, respectively: “Please let it be one!” and: “Please, oh please, let it be a mouse and not a rat.”
Everyone recognises and admires the clarity of the insights into the methods of totalitarianism and into human psychology that permeate George Orwell’s 1984. The book is, for me, made even more powerful by the fact that I share Winston Smith’s utter terror of rats. For Smith, rats are the horror that lie in wait in Room 101, and that make him unable to resist embracing the party line at the end of the book.
I know just how he felt. So, as I googled how to distinguish a domestic infestation of mice from one of rats, my interest was far from academic. Having done the research. I spent some time debating with myself whether the droppings I had collected had ends that were rounded or that came to a point, and whether a particular dropping resembled more a grain of rice – and did they mean basmati, arborea or japonica rice? – or a miniature dolls-house banana.
Eventually, I convinced myself that our uninvited guest was a rat. Bernice, despite her doubts, humoured me, and at this point we agreed that we were “gonna need a bigger boat”, or, in our case, a professional exterminator. Fortunately, Bernice found one who lives half a mile from us. She caught him as he was on his way to a barmitzvah, but he took the time over the phone to instruct us to buy three sticky-pad traps, leave them overnight, and update him in the morning.
When I hesitantly opened the utility room door on Friday morning, I was confronted by a sea of droppings on the floor, more items knocked off the shelves, and two of the sticky-pad traps bearing the marks of a considerable struggle, at the end of which the presumed rat had managed to break free and escape.
I updated the exterminator, who came round within an hour. Having examined the crime scene, his good news was that we were hosting mouse, rather than rat. However, his bad news was that it was clearly not mouse but, rather, mice. Pausing only to scoff at the puny glue mats I had bought, he laid down three of his ‘professional’ mats, and also set a humane trap that we had borrowed from our neighbours.
Then he hit us with the really bad news. Once the traps had removed our current resident mice, or, worse still, if the traps failed to work, we had to clear everything out of the utility room, throw away any food-related items, and thoroughly clean the room, before returning ieverything
At this point I need to explain that, if I possess a super-power, it is packing. If I possess a second super-power, it is hoarding. I can take a salon-ful of clothes, toys, books, toiletries, art supplies, foodstuffs and other assorted ephemera and pack everything into two cases to take to Portugal. I can also take a 3x2m utility room and find a way to store in it the entire contents of a small hardware store, 75 beer bottles for home brewing, a small fridge, a small freezer and a washing machine, several thousand plastic bags, an embarrassing number of empty wine bottles for recycling, light bulbs for fittings that we replaced decades ago, more vases than we have flat surfaces to put them on, and a few offcuts of wood and plastic lids that deep down I know I will never find a use for until the day after I throw them away.
How do I know that I can do this? Because I have actually done so.
Not content with having ensured that our next week would be devoted to clearing, washing, sorting, dumping and re shelving everything in the utility room, the exterminator then asked Bernice’s permission to humiliate me completely. Assuring us that he knew the layout of these houses, and the mentality of the householders, only too well, he strode into the salon, with a sadistic smirk on his face, made straight for the cupboard under the stairs and threw the door open with a triumphant flourish. “And all of this,” he declared, “has to go.” Recognising that he was right did nothing to diminish my sense of humiliation. However, I will retain a tiny scrap of dignity by choosing not to share with you what is stored under our stairs. Suffice to say that it is all the stuff we need less often than a lightbulb for a fitting we threw away in 2004.
A couple of minutes later, he was gone, having charged us a very reasonable fee for his time, his traps, his advice and his expertise. The humiliation he agreed to throw in for free.
In the first couple of days since then, two mice were trapped on the glue mats. We are not comfortable with that, and we recognise that this is not a humane way of removing vermin. However, the mice have been treating the human mousetrap as a vending machine. No matter how delicately I balance the lever, every few hours the cheese has gone but the trap is still primed. Our discomfort at using the mats is, at this point, outweighed by our disgust at sharing the house with mice.
By Sunday evening, we had completely cleared from the utility room everything except the appliances, thrown away at least a half of it and washed the other half. When I picked up the very last item – a plastic bag full of fruit tree netting – it wriggled under my hand. Somehow I held on, shuddered, knotted the bag tightly, shuddered again, climbed off the step stool, and, shuddering, put the plastic bag in a bigger, stronger bag and took the mouse far away. Meanwhile, Bernice finished thoroughly cleaning all of the empty shelves.
On Monday morning, it was clear from the droppings that we had at least one more visitor (Isn’t that always the way? One moves in, and, before you know it, there goes the neighbourhood.) So, off I went to buy some more traps. The first shop I tried doesn’t stock glue mats on humanitarian grounds. The second was sold out. I took this as a message to my conscience, and bought a 21st Century humane trap, in orange and green, with a gravity-driven tipping mechanism that looked infallible.
Before we left for Zichron yesterday (Monday), I baited and set the humane trap. When we returned, the trap had been triggered. As I picked it up, I feel no movement inside and heard no sound. Bernice asked whether it felt heavier than the previous evening. I don’t know about your muscle weight memory, but I certainly wouldn’t trust mine to detect, after an overnight break, the extra 20 grams of an adult mouse.
So, off we went again for a country outing. When I held the trap over a wadi at arm’s length and gingerly opened one end, all that fell out was the piece of English white mature cheddar I had primed the trap with the previous evening.
So, this morning, before we set out to meet friends in Tel Aviv for lunch, I set out lunch for the mouse in the humane trap and sighed deeply. It is now Tuesday early evening. We have just returned to find some more droppings (just in case we thought we might be able to convince ourselves that there is no fourth horseman of the apocalypse) and the trap untouched. We have come to the conclusion that we now need to move the appliances, and just hope that this will flush the rascal out and enable us to…
Which is more or less where our plan peters out. The best-case scenario is that, when I move the appliances, the mouse will run out waving a white flag and agree to enter the humane trap. To be honest, I’m not convinced that’s going to happen.
The worst-case scenario, I guess, is that the mouse will leap up and start eating my face. To be honest, my google research suggests this is highly unlikely.
Which leaves….what? Me trapped behind a washing machine in a utility room that barely has room for me and the machine, while the mouse runs round the middle of the room, looking for a way out. We can’t have the door open while we do this, because that will inevitably mean the mouse exiting and us emptying at least one other room of all its accumulated stuff. We can’t have the door closed, because there genuinely isn’t room to pull out the appliances without taking the door off its hinges.
Sadly, I think I am going to have to look harder for inhumane glue pads. We’re simply not prepared to carry on living like this indefinitely. If the mouse insists on making it him or us, I’m afraid it’s no contest. If that makes me an unfeeling barbarian, then so be it. Any time the mouse wants to take the cheese, trip the trap, and relocate to the country, the offer, and the trap, remain open.
