We allowed ourselves a quick
holiday-within-a-holiday to Gokarna and arrived back to find that nature had
reclaimed the house. Frogs in the mugs, ants nest in the door jamb and a new
style of punk lizard which perches at head height looking at once mid-80’s and prehistoric.
It’s always the same when you return to your empty house after a period away-
things look different, the place smells a little stale, and it often seems,
judging by the predeparture detritus, as if burglars might have been. As we
potter about, sweeping and unpacking, we both individually pause between rooms
to cock our heads at an angle and scowl suspiciously: undoubtedly a very wrong
smell haunting the place. From childhood the protocol is always: ignore the
smell indefinitely until someone else buckles and deals with it. Kate pretends
to be busy, I light five sticks of incense at once, Max creates some masking
smells of his own.
“Good to be back!” I declare with what I
intend to be a carefree air of domestic satisfaction. “Hmmm, lovely.”
Minutes pass, then… “Can you sm-?” “Yes!”
We stalk into the bedroom and eye the
tell-tale bulge in the tarpaulin that is pinned above our bed. I balance twitchily
on a cane chair, using one hand to untie one corner of the tarp, the other
holding a torch.
The heat at the top of the room is insane,
and the unmistakeable morbid stench prompts a little gastric roly-poly. Vigorous
and sticky-feeling black flies swarm around my eyes and nostrils as I cast the
torch beam about. I consider at this moment whether it’s better to find a huge
live rat in the sheeting above your bed, or a dead one.
It’s clear which one smells more offensive,
and as I emit an involuntary cough-and-shudder combo, I inadvertently let the
tarp drop a little. The cat-sized rat corpse squelches as it slides to the
edge. I feel a little trapped: my position on the chair is precarious and
requires a handhold to get down without flipping the chair over; I need to keep
the tarp level so that the rat and its putrid fluid doesn’t cascade onto our bed;
I have to keep the torchlight on the rat so I know that it’s not about to slip
off (or pounce at my face, perhaps). My arms are aching and I’m breathing in
rapid shallow breaths, covered in sweat. We clearly haven’t thought this
through. I bark inarticulate orders through plosive exhalations.
“Get-the-thing-! Quick!”
Kate and Max swirl below. Max is bereft of
a truck or something and is pulling at the chairleg. Kate asks “What thing?”
“Fuck- euchhh- Just get the thing!!”
The rat is right on the lip of the tarp,
and I’m blinking fast to keep flies from resting in my watery eyes. I think I
wanted a dustpan, but in the end Kate wisely reappears with a plastic bag. The
trikanasana yoga series comes in handy since I have to reach another few inches
to grasp the thick tail. There is, sadly, a wet clicking noise as I notice that
whilst the tail is moving, the bulky torso remains.
“Hey Ben, Kate!”
To our great surprise, there in the doorway
is Sandeep, our landlord, and his son, dressed in what appear to be Elvis
impersonator outfits. Sandeep’s suit is white with broad silver stripes. There
is audacious crimson filigree about the lapels, and perhaps even sequins. They
are iridescent in the afternoon light. The tension and absurdity of the moment
are overwhelming. My mind shifts into a fugue state, presumably in
self-preservation.
With a lurching effort, I finally bag the
rat, hose the place with poison, tumble down from the chair and we spend a
moment wondering what to do with the body. Compost? Burial? Bin? Surely not the
bin. Too large for the toilet. Sandeep, who as it turns out has just come back
from a wedding, says something to his son, who takes the bag and lobs it into
the river at the end of the garden. We are too traumatised to object, and
merely look on in silence as the bright blue WHSmith bag bobs and drifts out of
view.
